GLOUCESTER POINT, Va. (AP) — Stepping onto an outdated wood duck blind in the center of the York River, Bryan Watts appears down at a circle of sticks and pine cones on the weathered, guano-spattered platform. It’s a failed osprey nest, taken over by diving terns.
“The birds never laid here this year,” said Watts, close to the mouth of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. “And that’s a pattern we’ve been seeing these last couple of years.”
Watts has a more intimate relationship with ospreys than most people have with a hen — he has climbed to their nests to free them from plastic baggage, fed them by hand and monitored their eggs with telescopic mirrors.
The fish-eating raptor identified for gymnastic dives and whistle-like chirps is an American conservation success story. After pesticides and other hazards practically eradicated the species from much of the nation, the hawk-like hen rebounded after the banning of DDT in 1972 and now numbers in the 1000’s in the U.S.
But Watts has documented an alarming development. The birds, which breed in many elements of the U.S., are failing to efficiently fledge enough chicks around their key population middle of the Chesapeake Bay. The longtime biologist blames the decline of menhaden, a small education fish important to the osprey diet. Without menhaden to eat, chicks are ravenous and dying in nests, Watts said.
Osprey are an environmental indicator
Watts’s claim has put him and environmental teams at odds with the fishing industry, commerce unions and sometimes authorities regulators. Menhaden is priceless for fish oil, fish meal and agricultural food as effectively as bait.
U.S. fishermen have caught at least 1.1 billion kilos of menhaden every yr since 1951. Members of the industry tout its sustainability and said the decline in osprey may have nothing to do with fishing.
But without help, the osprey population could tumble to ranges not seen since the darkish days of DDT, said Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
“The osprey are yelling pretty loudly that, hey, there’s not enough menhaden for us to reproduce successfully,” Watts said. “And we should be listening to them to be more informed fully on the fisheries side, and we should take precaution on the fisheries management side. But that hasn’t won the day at this point.”
Decline linked to menhaden in research
Watts, who has studied osprey on the Chesapeake for a long time, has backed his claims of population decline by publishing research in scientific journals. He said it boils down to a easy statistic — to keep population, osprey pairs need to average 1.15 chicks per yr.
Osprey were reproducing at that stage in the Nineteen Eighties, but at the moment in some areas around the essential stem of the Chesapeake, it’s less than half of that, Watts said. In notably distressed areas, they aren’t even reproducing at one-tenth that stage, he said. And the decline in accessible menhaden matches the areas of nesting failure, Watts said.
Also called pogies or bunkers, the oily menhaden are particularly important for younger birds because they are more nutritious than other fish in the sea. Osprey “reproductive performance is inextricably linked to the availability and abundance” of menhaden, Watts wrote in a 2023 research revealed in Frontiers in Marine Science.
Conservationists have been involved for years, saying too many menhaden have been eliminated to keep their essential function in the ocean food chain. Historian H. Bruce Franklin went so far as to title his 2007 e book on menhaden “The Most Important Fish In The Sea.”
Fishing industry pushes back
Menhaden help maintain one of the world’s largest fisheries, price more than $200 million at the docks in 2023. Used as bait, the fish are important for priceless industrial targets such as Maine lobster. They’re also beloved by sportfishermen.
The trendy industry is dominated by Omega Protein, a Reedville, Virginia, company that is a subsidiary of Canadian aquaculture giant Cooke. The company pushed back at the concept that fishing is the cause of osprey decline, although it did acknowledge that fewer menhaden are exhibiting up in some elements of the bay.
Federal knowledge show osprey breeding is in decline in many elements of the nation, including where menhaden is not harvested at all, said Ben Landry, an Omega spokesperson. Climate change, pollution and development could be taking part in a function, said Landry and others with the company.
Blaming fishing “just reeks of environmental special interest groups having an influence over the process,” Landry said.
New guidelines could be on the approach
The menhaden fishery is managed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate physique that crafts guidelines and units fishing quotas. Prompted by questions about ospreys, it created a work group to deal with precautionary management of the species in the Chesapeake Bay.
In April, this group proposed several potential management approaches, including seasonal closures, restrictions on quotas or days at sea, and limitations on sorts of fishing gear. The course of of creating new guidelines could start this summer season, said James Boyle, fishery management plan coordinator with the commission.
The osprey population has indeed proven declines in some areas since 2012, but it’s important to keep in mind the hen’s population is much bigger than it was before DDT was banned, Boyle said.
“There are big increases in osprey population since the DDT era,” Boyle said, citing federal knowledge exhibiting a six-fold increase in osprey populations along the Atlantic Coast since the Sixties.
Environmentalists says hen’s decline could worsen
To a quantity of environmental teams, any decline is too much. This irritates some labor leaders who fear about dropping more jobs as the fishing industry declines.
Kenny Pinkard, retired vice president of UFCW Local 400’s govt board and a longtime Virginia fishermen, said he feels the industry is being scapegoated.
“There are some people who just don’t want to see us in business at all,” he said.
But Chris Moore, Virginia govt director for Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the nation dangers dropping an iconic hen if no motion is taken. He said Watts’s research show that the osprey will fail without access to menhaden.
“Osprey have been a success story,” Moore said. “We’re in a situation where they’re not replacing their numbers. We’ll actually be in a situation where we’re in a steep decline.”
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Whittle reported from Portland, Maine.
___ This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The AP is solely accountable for all content material.
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